Thanks both to those who have contributed posts and to those who have offered kind words. Here are a few responses collected into one.
It's an odd title for the show thread, given the essay in question seems to cover a much larger question than materialist science?
Mmm, I would probably have chosen to omit "materialistic", and maybe substituted "a broadly scientific approach" for "materialistic science", but it's Alex's show, and he gets to choose the titles that are going to most pique people's interest. As you say, no biggie.
I suspect that if it's true there are subtle worlds interlocking with our worldy consensus reality many of the options might be true.
Nice. The existence of subtle worlds could probably be turned into a data point in itself: there is all sorts of evidence for these worlds ranging from shamanic experiences to OBEs, NDEs and mediumistic communications with spirits from within these worlds.
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[M]ost accounts of mystical experiences of all sorts [...] seem to contain [a] sense of timelessness.
Yes, and yet I find this curious, because many (most?) of those same accounts seem to contain active experiences: communications with other beings, and travel through scenes. This seems to imply time. My guess is that rather than
literal timelessness, time is simply experienced in a radically different way during these experiences than in "ordinary" reality. [I drafted that part of this post before Sci offered his own critique of timelessness, which I think is to the point.]
Possibly the most wretched, evil experiences don't impact on us for more than a certain length of time.
Possibly, but does that make them any more justifiable (more on this below in response to tim)? And over the course of history, they seem to have been pretty persistent in general.
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[T]he problem [is that] we may be unable to make logical sense of the intentions of "something"/"someone"/"some beings" whose nature is so different from ours.
That's a possibility, and, as David points out, many subjects of mystical experiences report being unable to express that which they experienced and understood. I am, though, more optimistic about this, and I think that anyway we should do our best to exhaust the possibility of rational explanation (even if based on mystical insight/intuition/revelation) before throwing up our hands and saying "It's impossible to understand!"
A lot of people here appear to enjoy the mystery. I don't.
Nor do I, and nor do I find any explanation I've heard or considered for "the veil" especially plausible - particularly the ones involving an omnipotent and loving God.
Thanks for taking up my request and elaborating on your demiurge-as-amoral-artist hypothesis. :-)
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Now that's a personal view. But maybe that's as good an answer as there is - there are as many answers as there are people.
How maddeningly post-modern! I say that with affection though, Typoz, because you always speak from a good heart: healing and restorative indeed. :-)
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Would those who have expressed their preference for a specific option (#2 in particular) be so kind as to answer Laird's questions (I copy and paste some excerpts from his post below) so that we can follow the logical reasoning who made them opt for it?
Thanks, Magda. A freewheeling discussion is of course just fine, and I wouldn't want to interrupt it, but a methodical approach is also useful, which I hope the blog post demonstrated.
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Tim, I know you weren't speaking definitively, and you were just expressing what seems right to you, so I hope you don't mind me addressing your comments in the way that I'm about to.
If we didn't have some "crap" experience from the earth do compare [the perfect existence] to, how would we know it was so good.
This seems to be a pretty popular argument/opinion, and it was thrashed out from
page #3 to page #5 of the "Puzzling NDE questions" thread last year. I take the opposite view, as expressed by Kai, Bucky and others in that exchange.
As regards children getting cancer (which is one of the favourite atheist "sticks" to bash "god" with and understandably so) how can that NOT happen sometimes.... with the way we've organised our world. Children also fall out of skyscrapers, get eaten by sharks, choke on grapes etc. What should we do ? Don't build skyscrapers ? Kill all the sharks, don't allow grapes to exist ? Get rid of everything that threatens to harm anyone, what kind of absurd world would that be ?
Isn't this a form of victim-blaming though? i.e. Blaming the occupants of the world for the pitfalls of its design? Shouldn't we really be asking why the design has such pitfalls in the first place? After all,
some people spontaneously and miraculously go into remission from cancer: why was the "design choice" not such that all of them do; even that cancer never developed in the first place? Yes, children fall out of skyscrapers, and yet, again,
miracles sometimes prevent them from coming to harm: why was it a "design choice" for these miracles to be selective rather than universal? Etc etc. We know that miracles to prevent accidental harm are possible. Why so rare? Or why even require a "miracle" to prevent accidental harm: why not simply design a world without the possibility of accidental harm in the first place? (Of course, all of these questions assume an omnipotent and good creator God, which is the very assumption in question)
And if children are "spirits" (returning to experience some more of this "crap" that we have to deal with down here) and they "know" they are fundamentally indestructible beings and the "body" is only a costume etc then would it matter ultimately ?
But is what "ultimately" matters the point? Yes, suffering is (or seems to be - the possibility of an eternal hell excluded) temporary, but does that make it any more justified? Does the fact that an experience will end, and that we will be able to look back on it and say "it doesn't matter now", make it any more tolerable
at the time? Your point could be turned into a pretty deplorable justification for harm by an unethical person: "Hey, ultimately, this isn't going to matter, so shut up and stop complaining while I cut off your fingers one by one with these bolt cutters".
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Not necessarily a mess. In a city you can have prostitution, drug trafficking, reckless gamblers, heartless thieves....but New York also has areas other than Wall Street.
:-D
Haven't listened to that podcast yet, but am very much receptive to the possibility that animism is true (at the same time as theism). Have had an experience which seemed to validate a Dreaming story of indigenous Australians, in which ancestor beings were frozen into a rock formation.
So we don't have an omnipotent God refusing to answer the world's suffering, but rather a God that descends into (or possibly as) lower levels of reality and seeks to push all of this creation back to an enlightened state?
That does make a lot more sense in one way, but as I wrote in the blog post, it's difficult to reconcile with a lot of NDE reports and other STEs which present a more "God's in total control of His reality" (other than free will choices) view rather than a "God's come down here to fix this broken reality" view. It's also difficult to reconcile with the apparent fine-tuning of the universe.
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You write: "Psi is seen to be the natural means of spirit perception/communication, which is inhibited when a spirit’s consciousnes is “filtered” through a brain." To me, this has a big problem which is the index:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threa...stockholm-syndrome-296.2851/page-2#post-81417
To me, it is more likely that "psi" is spoon fed to us by a separate intelligence(s) than it is likely that this is the product of some kind of "talent" or "gift".
Your conclusion is possibly true but I don't think your argument is sound, because access to some sort of "universal" memory seems to be no more in need of an index than access to "ordinary" memory - so, unless you are to argue that access to ordinary memory is via spoon feeding too, then something seems amiss with your reasoning.
In my opinion, psi is regulated.
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/suggestions-for-alexs-book.698/ There are no mediums with lottery numbers! There are no crashed UFOs (yes, we can argue Roswell). All these subjects are sterile and never progress! How can this be? My answer, we are not dealing with phenomena - we are dealing with
intelligences who are deliberately keeping things mysterious. I do believe it is in the plural but I also believe that somebody (God?) is preventing certain information being disclosed (like lottery numbers). God is a God of plausible deniability! Why? Because the important thing is for us to think about it.
You seem to be arguing that there have never been any "obvious" or "indisputable" or "macro-scale" (as opposed to merely statistical) demonstrations of psi or alien encounters, but this is simply not true.
Frequently, mediums have been documented providing indisputably correct information, sometimes even novel information that nobody alive knew but which was later confirmed. Some remote viewing sponsored by the US government provided information about e.g. a Russian submarine project, including the date of launch of the submarine itself, that was later confirmed via satellite on that launch date. Alex describes in his book the case of a psychic detective featured on his show whom detectives affirm provided such clear and specific information as allowed them to solve the case, and which a hardened skeptic failed utterly to refute. Etc etc etc etc. Really, the list of examples is very long. You don't seem to have done your homework. :-)
This matrix has no glitches. To me this mitigates against demiurge ideas or ideas where there is an equal battle. Battles leave wreckage!
You don't see any wreckage in this world?! Half of the news these days (which I no longer watch) is wreckage!
It is my “gut feeling” that evil is somehow absurd. I cannot imagine an omniscient being being evil. Just a feeling.
I think you've got the sentiments right but the argument wrong: the existence of evil given an omnipotent and good being
is absurd - on that we agree - but when you combine that with the fact that evil
does exist, which conclusion do you think follows?
Re conventional Christianity: you and I agree wholeheartedly that there is much truth in it. Yes, the demoniac and satanic exist, and it is very foolish to play around with them. But if God vs Satan is not a real fight, then what on Earth is God doing putting up with this fiend in His world? Why delay the inevitable, with all of the suffering entailed?
I’ll admit I have a bee in my bonnet on this. I was psychotic and delusional about it back in 2009. So, probably you shouldn’t trust me on it
You and I have had very, very similar experiences, Alan. The main difference is that I haven't bought into the psychiatric interpretation of them as much as you seem to have done. Trust your intuition: there are dark forces out there which - for various reasons - sometimes gain access to our psyches. I very much recommend Roy Vincent's (self-published, free) book,
listening to the silences in a world of hearing voices. Reading through his own experiences I found effective proof that they were caused by malevolent entities, as I am certain they are in your case and definitely in my own (although I certainly wouldn't rule out divine influence in all cases either). Especially helpful for me was
Roy's list of "ploys" used by these malevolent entities. I only recognised some of them, and I have experienced some different ploys that "they" use in my own case, but it was very helpful to find that, yes, other people have recognised that these entities play certain identifiable games with them. Perhaps you will recognise some of the ploys Roy lists, and perhaps you have already identified some different ones that "they" use in your own case.